Mario Bava: The Essentials

Mario Bava (July 31, 1914 – April 25, 1980) was an Italian director, screenwriter, and cinematographer. Bava was a journeyman in the 60s and 70s world of Italian pop cinema and worked in a variety of genres including spaghetti westerns, gialli, gothic horror and poliziotteschi. Bava even ventured into the comic book realm with his 1967 cult classic Danger: Diabolik. Bava's incredible imagination, resourcefulness and unique eye for colorful, atmospheric cinema photography/set designs were his greatest strengths as a filmmaker.

Essential Films to Watch

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This book written by Tim Lucas (Video Watchdog) contains 1128 pages of four-columned type (nearly 800,000 words!), fully illustrated with well over 1000 stills and annotated poster art from all over the world, most in full color and all subjected to a three-year process of meticulous digital restoration. Included are never-before-published family photos, documents, and drawings by Bava himself, and an eye-popping array of images that Bava fans never expected to see: a wealth of color shots taken on the set of the B&W classic Black Sunday, the only photos taken of Catherine Deneuve while briefly cast as the female lead in Danger: Diabolik, and dozens of pictures of the notoriously camera-shy director himself. The extensive appendices include filmographies for Mario and Eugenio Bava, international discography and videography, name and film title indexes, and a generous gallery of storyboard art by Bava, including his complete art for an unproduced 1970s project, Baby Kong. With an Introduction by Martin Scorsese and a Foreword by the late Italian director Riccardo Freda, Mario Bava All the Colors of the Dark marks an exciting new development in the fields of film-related biography and book-making. Buy Book

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